


Heroes aren't meant to survive

by AgapantoBlu



Series: There's a monster in my mirror [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Children Shouldn't Fight A War And Shiro Knows It, Gen, POV Second Person, Past Torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Shiro's Introspection, Song Lyrics, Suicidal Thoughts, song-fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-04
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-26 21:31:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13866408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgapantoBlu/pseuds/AgapantoBlu
Summary: You don’t want to add the Paladins to your bloody trophy room. You refuse to.At night, in your room, you claw at the prosthetic, you draw out blood, you try to rip it off. And it hurts and it hurts and it hurts, but it’s not enough and you want to smash your head into a wall for your uselessness.- And you know, heroes aren’t meant to survive,so much harder to love when alive.-(MIKA - "Heroes")





	Heroes aren't meant to survive

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who’s European, can’t watch Voltron S5, and is bringing back the dear old song-fic genre because she has found a new song to tear her heart apart? I should really stop writing stuff at one in the morning.
> 
> Warning: ANGST; Suicidal Thoughts; Mentions of Torture and Blood; PTSD. Have you guessed who is this about? Yeah, congrats.
> 
> Song: “Heroes” - MIKA

 

**The kids in the hundreds tomorrow will march through the dark,**  
**they’re fighting someone else’s war.**

 

_They’re just kids._  It runs through your head and you want to scream it to the void, to yell it in the comms, to Allura, to Zarkon, to whoever may listen, because this is fucking abhorrent. They’re children, all of them, who smile and joke and can’t take this seriously because it would crush them, who give it their best and it’s never less than enough, who try to act though but they’re not, they’re not, they’re not,  _they’re kids._

When you were seventeen, your mother cuffed you on the head for not doing your chores in the house, too busy daydreaming of the Garrison, of space, of a thousand adventures you’ve now lived through with scars to show for each of them. When you were fourteen, you were reading comics with your classmates and stumbling your way through a butchered English you knew you’d have to learn to make your dreams come through.

 

**They’ll have so many stories to tell**  
**in exchange for a hero’s farewell.**

 

They used to call you a genius, and these kids all call you hero, but the truth is you’re just an adult, and there’s something tragically ironic about it. They look at you when things go wrong, when there’s choices to make, when hope flickers and threatens to die out, and what can you do? You’re their hero, you’re supposed to get them out of here.

And when they get hurt, oh, when they get hurt. When you cradle them through your arm and your prosthetic, when you have their blood staining your clothes and their tears wetting your shirt, when you see their skins go pale and you swear, cuss, pray, another chance,  _for fuck’s sake, another chance_ ; all these moments, you’re painfully aware of how your voice reaches them, how you only have three words to say to make a thin smile go to their lips, a flicker of useless pride, a childish satisfaction.

_You did great_ , you say, and that’s all they ask for the pain they feel. You’re their hero, after all. Who wouldn’t want your praise? And if it costs them some hours into a pod, then it’s no big deal, right? Just to get your approval, your respect.

You know you weren’t worth that much even before the enemy broke you.

 

**I wish I could, I wish I could make you return.**

 

The memories don’t leave, they keep you up at night, they throw you off the bed and rip screams out of your throat. The confidence you had mustered is now shattered on the ground; your dignity lives only in Keith’s admiring eyes and Lance’s endless lauds, in Pidge’s smiles against your chest and Hunk’s hugs around your middle. It’s not an illusion, but it’s not yours anyway.

The Shiro they all look up to, he died into a Galra arena, leaving his blood on the sand and just an empty shell behind.

 

**And what if I’ll never discern, as you walk to the toll of the bell?**

 

You shouldn’t be the leader.

You know it. You’re aware of it for every step you take in the role that feels like putting on your mother’s heels and stomping around the house at four years old. You’re a soldier with memories of Hell, you’re tired, you’re lost somewhere in the depths of your mind.

You have PTSD. You know that too. You never say it out loud, but you know it because you know enough about what happens to people after they get tortured.

In no situation, for no reason, someone like you should be in charge. The flashbacks come always at the worst moments, the last time you slept through a full night had been during the travel to Kerberos, the Galra sneer at you and call you Champion and you lose your goddamn mind because they know what you did and  _you don’t_.

But the others are all  _kids_. How are you supposed to tell them you’re too fucked up to save them? They think you’re the hero they looked up to when they were still cadets at the Garrison.

You clench your teeth, slip into your mother’s high heels and keep stumbling around, waiting for someone to notice, to see through the wrongness of it all and come wrench you from the spot that’s so clearly not yours.

 

**You’ll be fighting for our Heaven with Hell**  
**and you don’t understand**  
**why no one else can see.**

 

Allura’s mind is different from yours. She’d been young and naïve, like the other Paladins, when she’d been put into the pod, and the rage fueling her is still burning fiercely enough to keep the nightmares at bay for most of the time. 

Coran, though, he knows your misery. You can feel his eyes on you some days. At breakfast, after a night full of terrors; in training, after a stupid misstep that you could have so easily avoided once; after a mission, when a flashback had taken you down for a while and you’d grabbed it and wrestled it to get something out of it, just enough to save the others. But Coran never calls you out. You think it’s because he knows how you’d react too.

He calls Lance  _my boy_ , sometimes. It’s a slip up, because he always tries to call you all by numbers. When he fails, you find yourself watching him as he does with you. You wonder if he had a son that the Blue Paladin reminds him of, if he’s scared of getting too attached and losing again, if he’s seen children ten thousands years ago fighting in this war, before he got into the pod. 

You change your mind. You don’t want to know.

 

**Your blood on me, and my blood on you,**  
**wants to make you bleed; the only thing I wouldn’t do.**

 

Sometimes during training, your arm sings. It’s a wondrous, marvelous song that arches in your head like a siren’s, that drums in your chest like a ritual’s. It’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard and it begs you to sink your hand into Hunk’s chest and rip his heart out.

You jerk back, shocked by the intensity of the need, and it’s enough for him to touch you with the practice staff and take the victory out of you. He cheers and so do the others and you breathe hard and know you’re a monster. Whatever they did to you, it changed you too much.

A good-natured jab for the loss reaches you and you force yourself to laugh it off despite all the pictures of blood and gore and death replaying in your mind now. The sequence is not in chronological order, and you doubt it’s comprehensive. You’ve been a slave for a year, you haven’t risen to the name of Champion with twenty kills or something; they had to have been more.

You don’t want to add the Paladins to your bloody trophy room. You refuse to.

At night, in your room, you claw at the prosthetic, you draw out blood, you try to rip it off. And it hurts and it hurts and it hurts, but it’s not enough and you want to smash your head into a wall for your uselessness.

 

**And you know, heroes aren’t meant to survive,**  
**so much harder to love when alive.**

 

You see the aliens’ faces when they see you the first time. 

The story of your captivity is well-known across the universe. The brave Champion, the best gladiator, the slave who fought his way to freedom slashing and growling and roaring and drinking blood and screaming wrath; the loyal who took the fall for his companions, the brave who sought the open sky, the strong who leads salvation.

You guess you don’t really look like much, in person. 

You have more scars than the years you’ve lived, your body is strong but carries the proof of fragility, and your arm is a curtesy of the enemy. There’s no pride or confidence in your eyes, you can’t lift a shuttle with your bare hands. You don’t have fangs nor claws nor petrifying gaze.

The aliens observe you with a mixture of disbelief and discomfort, looking at all like they’re waiting for someone to tell them this is a joke or a mistake, certainly the brave Champion can’t be this broken thing in front of them. Their judgment carves your skin more than any of Haggar’s tools, probably because you’re of their same opinion.

You’re not a legend to tell the children at night, before bed. You’re perfectly aware of that, and you don’t think you’d want to be.

 

**Walk with the devil in your head,**  
**you would think you were better off dead**  
**and you don’t understand**  
**why no one else can see.**

 

Sometimes you lay awake in your bed, and wonder why you survived the arena. To be Voltron’s lead? No, you’re making a mess of that. To help the younger Paladins? No, they can look out for their own, they’re just that smart. To pilot the Black Lion? You know even as you think that, that Black is still cautious of you; that she’s testing you again and again and you’re barely on passing marks.

So what? What’s being alive worth to you, if this is how you go on?

Sometimes you think, death can’t be so bad, if life’s like this already. 

Who are you kidding? You think that often. Too often. Often enough that Coran’s looks are more focused, Keith’s expressions more worried, Black’s diffidence more pointed.

What need does she have, for a Paladin who can’t care to save himself, let alone the rest of the Universe? None.

You agree with her.

 

**Your blood on me, and my blood on you,**  
**wants to make you bleed; the only thing I wouldn’t do.**

 

The thing is, Keith and Lance and Hunk and Pidge, they deserve to get back on Earth. And they’re not going to until Zarkon is defeated. So you raise your arm and you fight, like you fought in the arena, not because you actively want to live, but because someone else needs you to survive. 

You don’t think of Matt and Sam and how your fighting didn’t do them any good. You think you might go insane, if you did.

 

**Where can you go?**

 

Your parents won’t have you back ever since you chose the Garrison over a peaceful life with them in Japan, Keith is stuck in space with you, your house had been the cadets’  dorms and then the officers’ quarters for so long and the only time you went back they strapped you to a metal table —  _just like them, just like there, just like her_  — so you’re in no hurry to get back.

 

**(Fighting, fighting, fight away)**

 

Another battle, another planet to save, another hit to take. Nothing new, by now. Your pain tolerance is so much higher, now, than it used to be.

 

**Where can you go?**

 

Nowhere. It’s the only truth you have.

 

**(Fighting, fighting, fight away)**  

 

Kill another enemy, it’s not like it’s the first. Bandage another wound, it’ll just be one more scar. Pilot, command, move. It’s automatic by now, it’s just a rinse and repeat, a re-run of an old sitcom in TV that your dad’s watching in the living room.

If someone were to split your skull open, you think they might find the instructions to fight carved in the hollows of your brain, and nothing else.

 

**We fight, we earn, we never learn,**  
**and through it all the heroes fall.**

 

The Paladins are the greatest gift you could have asked for, and you know you’re a despicable excuse of a human being for feeling like that. Their innocence is what crushes your heart the most, but it’s also the only thing keeping you afloat.

When Keith fails to understand just another pop-culture reference, when Lance comes up with just another stupid joke, when Hunk’s honesty puts his stomach above much else, when Pidge’s sarcasm betrays her care, you breath just a little bit easier. They give you hope that maybe this war is not going to kill them as it killed you, that maybe — just maybe — you’ll get to bring them home to their families and say,  _here, they’re okay_.

God, you would die with a smile on your lips, if your death could assure them just that much.

 

**I wish there was a way to give you a hand to hold**  
**‘cause you don’t have to die in your glory,**  
**die to never grow old.**

 

Keith tells you to stop talking as if you’re going to die any minute. You want to say,  _too late_ , but you don’t think it’d go over too well.

There must be cracks in your mask, because everybody tries to hold you up a bit. Lance forces you to get a face mask, Keith cuts your training short to make you go to bed, Hunk seeks you out to taste his experiments and Pidge shares this or that good thing her brother and father had told her about you. Allura offers to listen to your troubles; Coran knows you’re not ready to talk and just pulls you into an hug whenever nobody can see you.

You know it’s not enough, but you relish into it because a year sometimes feels like a lifetime, and it’s been so long since someone last showed you affection anyway.

 

**Your blood on me, and my blood on you,**  
**wants to make you bleed; the only thing I wouldn’t do.**

 

They love you, each their own way. Not because you’re the long-desired male heir, or the foreigner prodigy, or the youngest officer ever, or the chosen pilot of a great mission.

They don’t love you because you’re a hero. They love you because you’re hurting and they can see it and they don’t care because they’re hurting too and you never let it get in the way of how much you loved them.

When you sit at the table among their laughters, when you get spared by a laser for a shield that comes in between the training bot and your exposed back, when you hear them snoring softly around you at the tail end of a bonding night in the common lunge, you think you’d rather cut off your other arm than let anyone, ever, hurt them.

 

**Where can you go?**

 

Even if you had a place to go, you wouldn’t leave them here alone. Even if one day they stopped needing you and Black found someone better to pilot her and your scars were too many for you to fight anymore, you wouldn’t leave.

 

**(Fighting, fighting, fight away)**

 

Stop Zarkon. Don’t let him come near the kids.

 

**Where can you go?**

 

Nowhere. They’re your home now. It feels like belonging and like failing your family all over again.

 

**(Fighting, fighting, fight away)**

 

Haggar is in all your nightmares, but you’ll face her if it means stopping Zarkon from hurting Keith, from hurting them.

 

**We fight, we earn, we never learn.**

 

They deserve so much more than a broken asset, no matter how much they deny it and try to change your mind about that, but this is all you have to give so you will make it be enough, just enough, to get them to safety again.

 

**And through it all the heroes fall.**

 

If you have to die now, then so be it.

**Author's Note:**

> [Low-key my first Voltron work EVER so, please, be kind.]
> 
> Find me at @agapantoblu on Tumblr to chat!


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